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Comment by alephnerd | Hacker News Reader

> There's this idea that there's a "dual ladder", and the IC ladder offers just as much respect and compensation as the management one

It is not a lie. It is true IF you live and work in the Bay Area, Seattle, and TLV - which represent the bulk of tech industry employment.

Companies where the underlying stack is a revenue generator and not a cost center are companies where these kinds of dual tracks exist, but these are only found in the major tech hubs and are not available if you are remote first.

They also require you to be both technically and socially adept.

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>It is true IF you live and work in the Bay Area, Seattle, and TLV - which represent the bulk of tech industry employment.

Is that actually true (the bulk of people in the tech industry are working in "big tech" or startups)?

I don't know if there's any hard data around this, but my understanding has been that people working for these types of companies are maybe a single digit percentage of all tech workers (if that).

People working for those companies are certainly the most vocal online, though, which maybe skews perception.

Sorry, I guess we'll have to agree to disagree. The ladders are simply not comparable, even in the Bay Area. Sure, at the entry point where one transfers from the IC ladder to management compensation can even drop. However, that's the bottom rung - and one typically can't get straight into management as a new grad. The management ladder goes higher.

Best to remember this isn't a ladder but rather a tree. Yes, it goes much higher, but you chances of ever getting there is minimal because it narrows so quickly.

I mean, this is true and also not true. The management ladder does start higher and arguably does end higher with C-suite titles (though even that may not be the case, e.g. Google now has a Chief Technologist or two, who are SVP/C-suite level). But at the major tech companies under discussion in the parent, yeah the levels do map basically 1:1.

You can maybe argue that it's easier to advance on the management side, and I think that was certainly true pre-2023, but since then there's been a clear tightening of easy empire building advancement, and at least in my neck of the woods, I've seen IC-track advancement has been faster from staff to principal than from manager to director.

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